There’s a certain kind of old-school, backend web developer who, a long time ago, mastered things like Perl or Python or PHP or Java Server Pages, maybe even Rails or Django. This person worked with giant relational databases and built APIs that serve up JSON and even (gasp!) XML.

This person is a backend developer, so for a long time, JavaScript was just a fun little toy that added a bit of frontend trickery that could make things on a web page change color. If JavaScript was being really useful, it would add form validation that helped prevent the wrong information from getting into the database. Eight years ago